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Sunday, January 13, 2013

Habitat Hijinks I

  I've been struggling with coding habitats for the Hex Crawl Encounter Generator, which explains my lack of productivity this weekend.  I started with the 1e DMG Random Encounter and Random Terrain tables, quickly realized that they are not internally consistent, mixing vegetation, terrain inhabitants and age of the world with gleeful abandon.  I then moved on into defining habitat in terms of distance from coast, terrain, climate and vegetation; which gave me about 140 combinations.  Researching that led me to an old post on ; which is fascinating but didn't move the code.  Now I'm deep into the Koppen and Trewartha climate models and that's not moving the needle either.  I've simplified it to only seventeen distinct climates, but the problem isn't defining the climate, but in defining ranges of climate where creatures may be encountered.  I'd really like a single value to describe the range, but I'm afraid that that may not be practical.  I'm probably going to go back to the object definition for coding but it will be a few days before I can get the updates done to the generator.
  In the mean time, here's a post from +matt jackson  at  ...lapus calumni... with an excellent tutorial on using GIMP and Inkscape to make cool digital dungeon maps.  The only problem I have with it is that I can't draw the original in the first place.

1 comment:

  1. Those old tables are still classic though. I still use them occasionally.

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